Felix Fritsch

Felix Fritsch

Assistant Professor in Accounting & Taxation

University of Mannheim

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim, focusing on Empirical Accounting Research with a keen interest in information biases, strategic disclosure, and ESG, especially in the context of climate change. I am dedicated to leveraging modern data science techniques, such as NLP and Machine Learning, and alternative datasets to gain deeper insights into firm behavior and decision-making processes. Overall, my work aims at integrating recent technological advances with traditional accounting research, to address relevant and contemporary questions related to firms and their information environment.
Interests
  • Information biases
  • Strategic disclosure
  • ESG & Climate Change
  • NLP & Machine Learning
  • Empirical Accounting Research
Education

  • PhD in Accounting

    Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (2022)

  • Master in Business Research & Analytics

    Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (2019)

  • Master of Finance

    Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (2017)

Working Papers

Research

Responding to Climate Change Crises: Firms' Tradeoffs
In this paper, we examine the trade-offs firms make in their voluntary disclosure decisions following negative media coverage of climate change incidents. We combine a keyword discovery algorithm and a fine-tuned BERT model to identify “hard” and “soft” climate disclosures on Twitter. We find that firms on average tend to issue climate tweets as a rapid response to negative climate incidents. In addition, firms with a history of hard climate change disclosure, as measured by ESG reports, are more likely to issue climate-related responses than those without such a history of disclosure. Furthermore, we show that prior hard disclosure is associated with hard responses when the incident receives moderate media attention, but with soft responses when the incident receives low or high media attention. Our findings are consistent with the dynamic disclosure theory that early disclosure generates a real option for firms to flexibly respond to negative media coverage.
Felix Fritsch, Qi Zhang, Xiang Zheng
PDF
Budgeting Biases and Profit Expectations
We examine whether the use of budgetary information for performance evaluation and resource allocation is associated with systematic biases in the forecasts of senior executives of their firm’s future performance. Using a unique and proprietary data set of senior executives’ non-public profit expectations from 2013 to 2019, we find that an increase of importance in budget-based performance evaluation for subordinates is associated with underestimating future profit. This indicates that senior executives do not fully adjust for distortions in employee-generated information to budgets. Our results also suggest that this downward bias in budgets partially corrects for the otherwise, on average, too high profit expectations. We find partial support for the association of resource allocation with overestimating future profits.
Felix Fritsch, Matthias D. Mahlendorf, Utz Schäffer
PDF
Listening to Twitter: Helpful for Managerial Forecasting?
I investigate whether managers learn from conversations about their firm on Twitter when forming their expectations about future firm performance. I conjecture that tweets addressed to or about the firm, as initiated by its different stakeholder groups, such as customers, employees, or suppliers, contain useful and timely forward-looking information. I use a machine-learning-based natural language processing algorithm to analyze 11 million stakeholder-initiated tweets before the announcement of 4,131 sales forecast from 2013 to 2020. I find evidence that managers could learn from listening to conversations about their firm on Twitter and improve forecast precision before they announce their forecasts: I show that information in conversations is negatively associated with the directional error in management sales forecasts, suggesting that managers do not adequately account for third-party information: When the conversational information is negative, managers overestimate future sales. In contrast, managers tend to underestimate future sales when it is positive. Further, I find the relevance of Twitter information increases the closer the information is released to the forecast announcement date.
Felix Fritsch

Teaching

  • Introduction to Financial Accounting (ACC 300)

    Delving into the essentials of financial accounting, this course covers the fundamentals of financial statements analysis, balance sheets, and income statements. Key topics include revenue recognition, working capital management, and asset valuation. Emphasizing real-world application, students engage in group case studies, enhancing analytical skills crucial for dynamic business environments.

    Undergraduate Course (since 2023)
  • Research Seminar Preparation (ACC/TAX 910)

    A specialized course aimed at preparing PhD students for in-depth discussions on current accounting and taxation research. Focuses on critically analyzing papers presented by visiting researchers, enhancing scholarly discourse, and fostering the development of innovative research ideas.

    PhD course (since 2022)
  • Thesis Supervision

    Guiding students through the thesis process at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Supervision involves personalized mentoring, helping students refine research questions, develop methodologies, solve complex programming problems, and enhance their academic writing skills. The focus is on fostering critical thinking, analytical skills, and independent research capabilities.

    Undergraduate & Graduate Levels (since 2021)

Awards

AAA
‘‘When Opportunism Mitigates Over-Expectations - Budgeting Biases and Profit Expectations’’, coauthored with Matthias D. Mahlendorf and Utz Schäffer; American Accounting Association, Annual Meeting, 2021
AAA
One of the recipients of the Best Management Accounting Reviewer Award at the American Accounting Association, Annual Meeting, 2021

Code

TAR submission template
This repository contains a LaTeX template designed for paper submissions to The Accounting Review (TAR), a scholarly journal in the field of accounting. The template includes general formatting guidelines and citation styles that align with the requirements of the journal.
TAR submission template

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